Week 8: You Don't Even Look Like a Missionary

The other day, my companion and I went to visit a family we'd never met before. Outside their house, they had a mailbox library--a cheerily painted box filled with books so anyone who passed by could take or leave one. I opened up the hatch, looked through the books, and straightened some of them. I'd seen Facebook posts about mailbox libraries before, but this is only the second or third one I'd seen in real life. I think they're charming, and I planned on talking about it when I went to the door to meet the family.

Then the mom opened the front door. 

"Please don't put Book of Mormons in there," she called. "I don't want my neighbors to think I'm trying to preach to them."

I hastily explained that I wasn't and complimented her library. She said that she was a librarian, but not much more than that before she dismissed us.

I imagine that if her mailbox library works at all, if people ever take books, then she periodically gets knocks on her door from people who want to compliment her little library and ask why she started it. We could have successfully started off a conversation like that--if we hadn't been wearing nametags.

Two weeks ago, Sister Holland showed me a picture of some plainclothes missionaries in Oregon. They wear jeans, t-shirts, and no nametags. That's one of the church's experiments right now. Experiments lead to change. Come Follow Me was an experiment for a while and I've heard that certain missions experimented with weekly calls home to family before they were made universal. I wonder if all missionaries will soon be plainclothes. 

If they are, will I still call myself Sister Smith or be plain Erica? If the entire point of plainclothes missionaries is to make them not look stuffy and aloof, I imagine titles will have to go, too. Calling myself Sister is an immediate conversation barrier. 

That same day, I walked past a guy getting snow off his car and offered to help them. He was grateful and friendly-but then I said, "I'm Sister Smith. What's your name?"

Then it got awkward.

I can put up with having a title and stuffy clothes. But if that's the next thing on Hustle M. Nelson's chopping block, I'm all for it.

Sister Larsen wears slacks every day and she's said that some people (always members, never people she's taught) have told her she doesn't look like a missionary. And when Sister Holland showed me that picture of the missionaries, someone told me, "They don't even look like missionaries."

Oh, gag. Why should that matter? Looking "like a missionary" isn't important. Sharing the gospel is. Helping people is. And how we dress doesn't have anything to do with that. Fixating on missionary dress is mission-centric instead of Christ-centric. 

People fixate on nametags so much. When my stake president broke the news to me that I was going on a two-transfer mission instead of getting a true call, he told me, "You'll get to wear a nametag" like that was some kind of conciliation prize. And about a year and a half before that, when I was confiding in someone I trusted about how devastated I was at having been barred from a mission, she gave me a chipper little beam, squared her hand over her breast, and said, "You can always be a missionary to others, whether or not you wear the tag." Dunno why they thought I had a nametag fetish. Maybe because everyone else does. 

For all my talk about not being mission-centric, I'm probably the most mission-centric person there is. For the first six weeks I said in my prayers everyday that I was grateful to finally be a missionary, not that I was grateful to build up the kingdom of God, and that's wrong. For now, being on a mission, for me, is really all about proving I can do it when so many people tried every stratagem possible to keep me from it. I hope that by the end of my eighteen months, I've moved to a higher level of appreciation and duty and my joy is in building up the kingdom.